Here are my notes on what’s both good and bad about the Canary in the year that I’ve had it:

The Good:

The Canary has been sitting on top of my fridge for the last year. It faces the front door of my apartment. The video and audio quality of the camera has remained excellent since I’ve had it. I was initially worried that the wide-angle fish eye lens might distort the image too much but it hasn’t. To give you a better idea of the video quality and the lens configuration, here’s a video of a number of break-ins that were caught by several Canary owners, you can see how the camera performs in both daylight and night-vision modes:

The microphone picks up speech very well, it also picks up the hissing of my air conditioning unit, but it doesn’t drown out anyone’s voices when it’s running while people are talking.

The geofence-based self-arming and disarming features seem to work as advertised. When my cell phone leaves the area of my apartment it arms the motion activated recording on Canary, when I return it to shuts it off.

The temperature monitoring has been another useful feature as it alerted me to an A/C malfunction and I was able to get apartment’s maintenance working on my A/C before I even got home from work.

Canary let’s you set temperature thresholds in the app so you get notified when they are exceeded. I set my notification threshold to 75 degrees Fahrenheit and received a notification as soon as that limit was exceeded, letting me know I needed to call maintenance to come fix it. Sure beats coming home to a hot house and having to deal with it then.

The Bad:

Honestly, there haven’t been a lot of problems with the Canary. Not many lost network connections or anything of that nature.

I don’t find the air quality feature particularly useful, it seems very ambiguous when it notifies me and reports “abnormal”. What does that mean? Should I get out of the apartment when that happens? I don’t know.

Canary All-in-One – The Bottom Line:

Overall, I’m happy with the Canary’s performance. It has held up well over the year I’ve been testing it. The phone app is easy to use and I’ve experienced no connectivity issues since it was initially set up. Only maintenance I’ve performed was checking for updates to the app and wiping the dust off the lens every once in a while.

Do you own a Canary All-in-one? What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments section below:

It’s been about a year since I wrote that review so I though I would give my thoughts on this lock after having it for about a year, so here we go:

The Good So Far:

The lock mechanics are good and the lock itself is solid. HomKit (Siri Integration seems to work well). I can ask Siri if the door is locked, I can tell her to lock the door, or unlock the door, and she obeys without question. The August Smart Lock app has been updated several times since I’ve had the lock and it seems to have improved over the past year. Being able to issue temporary “digital keys” to family members has been a really nice feature when needed. The process for issuing them via “invites” was easy, as was the process for revoking already issued digital keys.

The Bad So Far:

There were a couple of times when the lock got jammed and wouldn’t open via the app. I had to run the lock calibration routine from the phone app in order to get the lock working again. I could see this as being a real problem if you don’t have your key and are relying on the key-less entry function only. Thankfully, I had my key and was able to get in and this only happened once, but still, you really want rock-solid consistency when dealing with this kind of product. This happened pretty early on in my testing so perhaps this issue has been addressed by some of the lock updates that have been pushed out.

Battery life was also a bit of a disappointment. I ended up changing them out about 3 times during the year. Again, perhaps this has been addressed in an update. I’ll report back in another year and let you know if it’s gotten better.

The Bottom Line:

Would I buy this lock again? Yes. Does it have a few quirks? Yes, but they are minor and the lock looks great and has performed well since I got it about a year ago. Overall I would say August has built an excellent lock that holds up over time.